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Originally Posted by kq76
Actually, I believe it is. You argued that death is not a sad event. I say for many of us it is and for some it doesn't matter one bit who died. I think the reason why you think death is not a sad event is because you feel only deaths of certain people bring out sadness in people and that the sadness is contingent on who that person is, but I believe that for some it just doesn't matter who died. For some, the death of anyone is sad and I think it's only fair to respect that they feel that way.
JoeC is right though. We shouldn't argue in a thread like this and I apologize for furthering it.
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The logical extension of this post is asking if you'd be more sad if your mom died than if an aunt died, and if you'd be more sad if an aunt died than if a stranger died?
The point is that we all have spectrums of grief based on how someone is related to us. Just because the people on the outer portion of that spectrum--complete strangers--don't evoke sadness in people like LLN and I doesn't mean that we aren't sympathetic. It just means that we prefer not to live our lives in eternal grief over the billions of people who will die while we are alive.
And all that is kind of peripheral to the point. The point is that this is being posted on an online micromanagement baseball simulation message board. Even if deaths of complete strangers made me sad, I don't see what place the obits have in the media or here.
I don't buy the sports connection making this relevant. Michael Jordan's father dying was relevant because he was playing, and it was reasonable to think it could affect his play. Same with Brett Favre. It can be poignant (to some people) to watch someone play on through that sort of emotional distress, to see how they react, and to see the emotional highs and lows clash when someone in that position succeeds. It's not so poignant to me to imagine Gretzky grieving in his mansion in retirement over the death of his elderly mother. A lot of people do that. Few do what Favre and Jordan did in such high-profile jobs.